For the curious, here are some shots from my recent trip up to Maine. Yes, there are a lot of mountain shots in there. That's why I went. :)

It's interesting. I enjoyed walking around Portland, and I enjoyed going up the side of a mountain out in the middle of nowhere. I like doing the gamut on vacations, apparently.

I'm such a slacker, though. Instead of carefully color-correcting and re-sizing the pictures, I uploaded them to LJ's Scrapbook and let it automagically make thumbnails and smaller viewable versions. If I waited to fix them, they'd never get posted. At least I know my own limitations.

Hates the 12-hour workdays, precious. Especially when I can't even use them to get ready for tomorrow's Hell day.

So I just got a jury summons in the mail.

I'm technically on standby status, which means I have to call the day before to see if I actually need to show up. If I'm called, I'm supposed to report to the courthouse at 8 am on the day I fly back from my vacation. My plane theoretically lands in Atlanta at 5:38 pm. I don't think I'll make it.

I will call the clerk's office in the morning to try to get a postponement. I'll happily fax or e-mail them a copy of the receipt and e-ticket if necessary.

The first time I've flown out of town in 2-1/2 years, and I get a jury summons. Just another reason to look forward to vacation.

The CSA decided to unload some "premium" items on customers this week to entice said customers to upgrade their subscriptions. One of the premium items was grits, with link provided for those who may be unfamiliar with this particularly (and peculiarly) Southern dish. (Though Wikipedia doesn't make the essential--well, to some people--distinction of hominy grits, made by soaking the corn in lye first.)

I briefly considered making Watershed's oh-so-nummy shrimp grits recipe, then discovered it was a pound of shrimp per 5 cups or so of grits. No wonder it was so tasty.

Instead, I tossed things into the crockpot overnight to make a plain (plus garlic) version, and I've been dressing up the results for breakfast this morning. Breakfast came a little earlier than originally planned, because the whole apartment smelled of garlic by 6 am. (It was only two cloves! I swear!) I think my favorite so far is parmesan curry grits, followed by traditional sausage cheesy grits (sharp cheddar). Italian (black pepper, parmesan, oregano, basil, more garlic, sun-dried tomato) was worth making and improving. Plain got two bites. Plain with egg yolk (from an over-medium fried egg) was somehow transformed into something wonderful, though the sausage-cheese with the fried egg was possibly better than the parmesan curry. I see now why people eat grits topped by poached eggs.

Plenty of leftovers, which I suspect will get reheated with an egg dropped in, then chilled, cut, and dipped into cornmeal before frying tomorrow morning.

When I was growing up, I hated grits. I'm still not a huge fan of plain grits, but the porridge is a great blank slate for playing with.

For anyone in the Atlanta area who might happen to have the money and inclination to eat out today (Wednesday April 22), I offer Dining Out For Life, benefitting Open Hand, an organization that prepares and delivers fresh, nutritious meals to people in metro Atlanta with health complications.

Sadly, there are no participants around my office, so lunch is out for me. I'm looking at La Petite Maison or Nancy G's for dinner. It might put me a little late for LotRO, but it's for a good cause.

And one of these days, I'll remember/discover this before the day that it happens. At least this time, I wasn't a couple of days late.

For the three people on my FL who haven't gotten there ahead of me, along with the rest of the world (like CBS, the LA Times, other news outlets and all of YouTube, where the video is the most-watched of the month so far, despite being up for less than a week)....

I give you Susan Boyle, a dumpy, almost-48-year-old virgin from Scotland, on "Britain's Got Talent."

Ah, the power of viral video in the modern day.

She chose a damn good--and apropos--song to sing, too. I was about as choked up as Amanda Holden. That's two now for BGT.

Edit: The Herald has a great article about her, her life, and people's reactions.

Kings is apparently being moved to Saturday nights. Which, really, is just a bleed-off of the remaining episodes. I sigh.

I especially sigh because that means I'll have to catch the episodes on Hulu during LARP weekends, rather than watching them on the nice TV when aired. Ah well. I'll still get the DVDs.

The writer are doing a good job, IMHO. I really feel sorry for Silas. In a lot of ways, I really feel sorry for Jack.

( Mild Spoilers for 'First Night' )

Wow.

Okay, the writers have impressed me. One side of the end of the episode, I saw coming. The shape of the bird in the street, wings outstretched to look like a butterfly ... not so much.

Damn good retelling of David & Saul, so far. I'm just hoping that the ratings improve, and they at least get to last out the season. Ian McShane does an impressive growly king.

I almost never watch American Idol. Watching it for a few minutes now, I am reminded why.

One of the judges just called "Always on My Mind" an untouchable classic. Um. Elvis "touched" Brenda Lee's song, and went gold with it. Willie Nelson's version was "touching," not an original song. Even after that, the Pet Shop Boys did a completely different version that peaked higher in the Billboard Top 100 than Nelson's. Since then, B.B. King, Fantasia Barrino (AI!), and Michael Bublé have all recorded versions of the song.

"Untouchable classic?" I like the song, but please.

So I just finished an hour-long game of Left 4 Dead with my younger brother and his fianceé. I was going to go to bed earlier, but I saw he was on Xbox Live, so I asked him if he wanted to do an online game. He was in the middle of one, so about 40 minutes later, he called me and we started. It's a really neat little game, even moreso when played co-op, and it was fun to be social with him from afar again. The game itself is a lot like being in a zombie movie (including the fact that both the fianceé and I died as the rescuers were showing up) , and I think it's awesome that the background music is individual to each player, based on how well you're doing, how much trouble you're in, that sort of thing. Thumbs--well, forefingers since the zombie hand on the cover of the game has no thumb--up. :)

Loved the "Best Original Song" medley. The end, blending "Jai Ho" (from Slumdog Millionaire) and "Down to Earth" (from Wall-E) was incredible.

To explain the title of my post, Peter Gabriel, who wrote "Down to Earth," had complained on his blog about having to cut his song down to a 1-minute snippet, and had refused to do so. Obviously someone else did so just fine.

Now, I do wish that there were more than 3 nominees. (Incidentally, 3 is the minimum by Academy rules. It's been 4 years since there were just 3.) Heck, the Golden Globe winner wasn't even nominated. But with just 3 nominees, I was fine with the medley instead of spacing them throughout the show, especially with the other production numbers, including the salute to musicals.

So I started to do the movie soundtrack meme earlier. (Media Center apparently will build the whole shuffle list when one hits play, so for just the titles, actual skipping isn't necessary. Of course, I wanted to hear the songs anyway, so....) Of course, once I started building the list, I realized that I have far too many soundtracks and scores (mostly movie, but some videogame) ripped to this computer. Probably a good 80% of the tracks that came up were actual tracks from movies, and of those, several were interestingly apropos, like "To the South" from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for the driving scene. While it's not fast driving music, it's so a piece I could see in one of those artistic driving scenes, when the shot is from inside the car, watching trees dappled by afternoon shadows going by.

However, I cannot even approach blackseven or outlawcoon for tragical mirth, apparently. Though "Covenant Dance" from Halo for the Prom scene was sort of amusing.

I may post the list later, if I can remember it. For now, though, the song titles contain spoilers to Season 2 of Torchwood, which I know some people have yet to watch. Yeah, the Torchwood soundtrack is on here, as is the soundtrack for the latest season of Dr. Who. It's wonderful what you can get on Amazon these days.

Without going into the politics of the whole thing....

Musical interludes, collectively: A. (I'm biased towards good music, but the 3 musical interludes--Aretha Franklin, the 4-part "Air and Simple Gifts", and the Navy Sea Chanters--were all great.)

Warren's invocation: B-. (Decent, not offensive or political, a bit long, then launched into the Lord's Prayer instead of just stopping.)

Obama's speech: A-. (Bipartisan, unifying, very Jeffersonian, but he was always looking at one of the two prompters.)

Lowery's invocation: A, possibly A+. (V. good use of Scripture, even when he didn't say it was Scripture--Amos 5:24 has been a favorite of mine since I read Nemesis--and the right blended of humor and reverence.)

Peaceful, mostly graceful transition of power: A+.

I just finished watching Richard III. As an example of how long it takes me to go through my Netflix queue, I added this back in September, after King John at the Shakespeare Tavern. On the other hand, I've admittedly bumped a few things up in the queue before it, and abused the heck out of the Instant Queue, now that I can watch them through my Xbox 360.

However, I have done a rare thing: I placed it on my Amazon Wish List after watching. Most movies, I'm fine watching them once. This is part of why my movie collection isn't as extensive as it could be--I see plenty in the theatre, and for many movies, once is enough. Netflix is perfect for me, really. However, there are a few movies I've decided after watching that I needed/wanted to own, and this is now another of them. Ian McKellan is magnificent in the title role, and the rest of the cast (Dame Maggie Smith, Annette Bening, Robert Downey Jr., Kristin Scott Thomas, Jim Broadbent...) are a treat to watch. While the play may not be strictly historically accurate, it is an incredibly well-written play on the corruptive nature of power. Not that there's anything modern about that....

While on the subject of good movies, I saw Gran Torino on Saturday. This is a vigilante movie in sort of the same way that Unforgiven was a genre Western--i.e., it's more of a deconstruction. Very, very good movie. Thumbs up.

Just like there's a certain degree of joy in putting out the Christmas decorations, there's a certain degree of melancholy in putting them away again. I'd really sort of prefer to keep them out for a while longer, especially after reading Terry Mattingly's article on the 12 Days of Christmas and how Christmas used to be the beginning of the Christmas feast season (ending at Epiphany), rather than Christmas heralding the end of the currently-termed "holiday season." However, Georgia's "Bring One for the Chipper" is tomorrow, and I'd like to recycle my tree while I can. The need to dispose of the tree properly is the one thing keeping me from leaving up the decorations Far Too Long. The record (for me) still stands at 13 months. At that point, I was moving out of the apartment, and had to take it all down.

So even with a nice cup of hot cocoa and cheery music (Christmas and non-Christmas mixed, until the tree goes off tomorrow and the Christmas music is put away again for a while--it's an odd little tradition, but it's mine), it's a touch depressing. Luckily, I had a decent day at work--first in two weeks--so I'm in a better headspace for packing it all away neatly for another year.

And Kit Marlowe's Doctor Faustus at the Shakespeare Tavern was v. cool last night. Plenty of opportunities to realize how rusty my Latin is, as well as a really neat adaptation. Still, I got enough of it, especially since several of the quotes were directly from the Vulgate. :)

So. Um. Yeah.

This? My hometown. The smokestacks from the coal plant were always my visual indicator of "almost home" when coming back from the west. Here's a photo gallery. While my parents are fine (being on the other side of town), the two guys in the photo gallery who live in the area (as opposed to cleanup workers & engineers) go to our current church or the old one. The house being featured in many of the photos (the "James house," these days)--including the splash photo on that first site--was built by another guy in our church, and he lived there for quite some time before selling it about 3 years ago. I have a lot of fine memories of that house and yard (as he hosted church functions often when I was young), and it's unbelievably strange to see it looking like a moonscape. Three houses have been condemned at this point, and TVA is working on simply getting access to the rest of the impacted houses. The area has been separated from one local water utility and quickly hooked up to another, for the sake of getting water provided quickly. Power's coming back in spotty bits--ironic, no?

There's a weird sense of numbness, even when something like this is in your face. It's sort of a "this happens to other people, even when it's other people I know" level of detachment, which is somewhat odd.

We'll be visiting later this afternoon, probably. There are family friends in the area who were impacted, even if the ash didn't end up in their homes. They have electricity back now, so they're back in the house, and in a typical Southern reaction, we'll be bringing food over later. I don't think I'll take pictures. It's sort of gauche, and in a way would tie me into the whole thing even more immediately.

The last of the decorating came a few days after the last post, when I put up the garland and lights on the balcony. My downstairs neighbor has commented on the balcony lights before; she thinks they look nice and cheerful when she's out back walking her dog. While I certainly enjoy them for my own sake, knowing that someone else enjoys and appreciates them makes me that much more likely to continue putting them up.

So my parents gave me some battery-powered LED candles that are self-timed. Basically, after the candles are first turned on, they stay on for 8 hours, then are off for 16, then start the cycle again. These two candles (on the mantle) turn on about 6:35 pm. There's a part of me that sort of glows when I come home from work late and worn out and then see the candles on. I finally realized that the way they look and flicker reminds me of the electric candles that my grandparents used to have in the windows of their house. On some level, I think I associate the ones on my mantle with those candles that used to be one of the first things I saw of my grandparents' house when visiting them around this time of year, and that's part of why they make me feel so good.

Saturday evening was one of the annual Christmas parties, and it was nice to see a lot of people that I don't often see anymore. Or at least see outside of games and such. I'm sort of odd, in that I always time my arrival to be while the kids are still around, then leave after the second shift--the non-kid adults--have shown up. I like to bridge between those groups, probably the better to see people.

Sunday was the first time I've gone caroling in ... decades, probably. I think I may have gone once in college, but I haven't gone regularly since high school. There were a lot of kids around, which I thought was just great. We had a li'l P-not (not to be confused with a P-nut), holleyberry's girls, Cosmo & Mangatsika, the Kitling and the Bit, then for one cul-de-sac, we picked up some kids from the houses we'd already hit as we went on to the following houses. I had tons of fun strolling from house to house (pre-scouted by lilisonna, and marked by the residents with ribbon on the mailbox) and singing a couple of carols per house. Definitely something that needs to become an annual occurrence. Team Darkling has such a great subdivision for that sort of thing.

I definitely got my workout over this past weekend, though. At Saturday's party, loresinger was singing "O Holy Night," so of course I had to go along. On the same pitch. If there were ever any doubt that I could run along in countertenor, that pretty much sealed it. Of course, I never should have done that with my sinus infection or whatever but oh well. Then Loresinger & I danced the koroboushka a while, which was tons of fun (haven't danced that in too long...) Sunday, not only was there walking from house to house, but after most everyone else was gone, the Kitling and the Bit each decided to take a leg and fly for a while (sitting on my foot while I raised it), then they each took a knee after my thighs started to ache after lifting cute munchkins over and over. There was some general bouncing (and some squirming and some knee-changing) before we did several rounds of "This is the Way the Lady Rides," which was (as usual) a big hit among the preschool crowd.

So overall, despite work, I've been pretty happy with the season. Good socializing, good cheer-spreading, enjoying time with friends and by myself. And making deviled eggs twice in 24 hours! Life's sort of mundane in a lot of ways, so I like to appreciate the magical stuff when it happens. :)

There's a crackling fire in the fireplace. Teapot (almost) full of tea. I'm full of tasty food. Christmas tree lights on and decorations up.

Okay, consider 'candles lit and home comfortable' for the hobbit-translation of the last. My gift shopping isn't (quite) finished yet, but I'm taking a timeout to enjoy home.

Once again, I'm posting about my weekend. Well, mostly.

I had a really good weekend visiting my parents, with a brief visit from my younger brother. It was fun to spend some time in the kitchen with Mom (well, only a little--she insited on cooking everythign herself, so I just fixed some banana scallops with banana guac on Saturday) and some time puttering about the garden with Dad. I now have a pot on my balcony with dirt and tulip bulbs; we'll see how the tulips turn out in the spring.

Saturday afternoon, we went up to the Cumberland County Playhouse to see Irving Berlin's White Christmas, a musical basde on the movie with some additional Irving Berlin songs added to help pad out the movie to musical length. The movie's one of Mom's favorites, so she & Dad were going with a couple of their friends. They invited me along since I was up there for the weekend anyway. It was a nice little regional theatre production, and I had some really good barbeque first, so thumbs up.

Of course, since Mom was cooking all weekend long, I came back with enough leftovers to feed me for nearly a week, and that's after Ye Younger Bro took some and Mom & Dad were keeping plenty for them as well. I'm definitely not complaining! :)

Started the job with the new office yesterday. I'm ... less than excited at the moment, but it's okay. I'm mostly doing what I call Trained Monkey Work at the moment. Basically, it's doing things that a trained monkey could do, which takes very little in the way of brains or knowledge. However, it's theoretically just for this week, so ... we'll see. I suspect I'll be stuck with the TMW for a while, but it'll be interesting to see how long and how I get away from it.

Still, Christmas is just around the corner. I've been putting up some decorations this week (including some that I brought down from the parents' house), shopping a bit online, and generally getting into the mood. Regardless of the economy, I love this holiday season.